One of the best ways for the Tivoli community to collaborate and share on the best ways to use Tivoli products is via Tivoli Wiki Central.Denny O’Brien, strategist and architect of this service, discusses the history and evolution of Tivoli Wiki Central below.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself.

Denny: I am the Outside-in Design Architect for Information Development in the IBM Tivoli Service Availability and Performance Management organization.One of my main goals is to find new, more effective ways to deliver technical information to our customers.One of the new ways in which we are doing that is through our external wiki strategy.I have been leading this effort for the past year now, and it is really starting to take off.

Q: Tell us about Tivoli Wiki Central. What is it? When did it first start? Why was it created?

Denny: Tivoli Wiki Central is the home for all Tivoli external wikis.You can launch to all of Tivoli's external wikis from Tivoli Wiki Central, and also read about the new wikis that are in development.

Tivoli Wiki Central was created after Pulse 2008 as a direct response to customer requests. The first wiki, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager, launched in February of 2008. At Pulse, we launched our second wiki, which covered the IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager product. During Pulse, customers really liked the wiki strategy and made requests for wikis that covered much of Tivoli's product portfolio.So, as we decided to add more wikis, it was clear that we needed a central launching point from which customers could access all of our wikis. And thus, Tivoli Wiki Central was born.

The Tivoli wikis enable customers, developers, Business Partners, and IBM employees to share and co-create best practices and scenarios for using Tivoli products collaboratively. They also provide links to white papers that have been contributed by IBM as well as content that has been created by customers and Business Partners.

Q: How many wikis exist on Tivoli Wiki Central today? Which topics do they cover?

Denny: Currently there are six wikis that are linked on Tivoli Wiki Central, and there are seven more currently in development.The following wikis are currently available:

Danyel Otteson, program manager of the Tivoli User Community, agreed to provide some insight into what we can look forward to in the site’s new facelift.

Q: Tell us a little about the history of the TUC site. What is the purpose of the site, who uses and sponsors it?

Danyel: The Global Tivoli User Community (TUC) was launched in 2003 and celebrated its 5th anniversary this year. The TUC remains focused on "Enabling the Tivoli User" by providing a forum where users can communicate meet and learn from each other's experience by offering both online and offline collaboration services all over the world.

Q: What motivated the need for a redesign of the site?

Danyel: The user community members were asking for easier navigation and quick access to product-specific information. Also, since we are celebrating our 5 year anniversary in 2008, we wanted to refresh the site with a totally new look and feel.

Q: What's new and different about the site?

Danyel: First, we gave the site a whole new fresh look to make it more modern and contemporary. We're using a new white and blue color scheme with much more white space and clear segmentation of sections of the site.

Second, we removed a lot of the text-intensive clutter around the site and focused on clear, repeatable actions most commonly used by the community in the left-hand section of the screen:

Q: What new functionality was added to the site? What new things can users do? Danyel: When we set out to do this re-design we were looking to improve navigation, emphasize local Tivoli user groups, provide faster access to product information, increase member participation, place a focus on business partners/sponsors, and create a clean "look and feel." Overall, our goal was to give our members an updated website with improved user group management capabilities for user group leaders.

Q: What can we look forward to in the future? Danyel: The future is bright for the user community. In 2009, we have plans for providing profile capability, simplifying registration for meetings, user group forums, increasing virtual meeting capability, and enabling social bookmarking such as digg, de.li.cio.us, and much more.

Q: How can our blog readers help you in this endeavor? Danyel: New users can sign up to use the TUC site today and start using the great resources and information on the website.

Existing members can help us improve our services by taking the satisfaction surveys available on the site.